


Something Close to Useful

by sundogsailor



Series: The Beasts We Keep [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: But kinda light on the comfort, Developing Relationship, Diabetic Hux, Hurt/Comfort, Hux is Not Nice, Hux-centric, Implied Semi-Hate Sex, Interrogation, Jedi Finn, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-25 13:08:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6196270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sundogsailor/pseuds/sundogsailor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hux's fleet was out of reach, if it was even still coherent. Ren was gone. He was alone, with nothing, trapped beneath a dirtball of a planet he’d never even seen the surface of. He dreamed of doing horrible, cathartic things, things that involved snapping bones and misty coughs of aspirated blood.</p><p>Or, Hux is captured by the Resistance eleven months after Starkiller's destruction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Hux resisted the basal urge to yank against the cuffs binding his wrists, their connector locked through a fixture on the bolted-down interrogation table. It was an irrational instinct, as both they and the table were heavy durasteel. Still, something animal clawed inside him, caged down deep but not as deep as he’d like.

His fleet was out of reach, if it was even still coherent. Ren was gone. He was alone, with nothing, trapped on a dirtball of a planet he’d never even seen the surface of.

He sensed his control fraying at the edges, vacillating between listless depression and white hot anger whenever he was too exhausted to keep himself from _feeling_. Loathe to break composure even when he was alone, Hux had strategically redirected effort to preventing those uncontrollable inner extremes from externalizing. Here, someone was always watching.

He tipped his head up just enough to assess the holorecorder perched in a corner of the ceiling, imagining vividly just what he would do to the Resistance rat on the other side of it if he could. It involved snapping bones and misty coughs of aspirated blood.

The door hissed open, allowing a familiar woman into the small interrogation room. She was well-built and wind chafed beneath her short brown hair, the first person he’d had the pleasure of sharing this tiny room with when he arrived. She’d left him physically unable to stand that day, and he hadn’t seen her since, but her stony, unsympathetic demeanor carried across all his other interrogators as well. Hux strangled his expression further into nothingness, refusing to acknowledge her presence.

The woman pulled out the chair across from him, setting a metal cup down within his reach with a clink. Its contents sloshed, wafting the alluring scent of caf into Hux’s nostrils, and his brows twitched together ever so slightly in bemusement. She crossed her arms and waited, occupying her seat with a nonchalant lean.

“You’re looking well,” she finally mused, apparently accepting that she’d be the first to talk.

Hux repressed a derisive snort. He knew he looked worse than a pile of Bantha shit now, and he felt like it too. Deep circles cradled his eyes, his body driven into the ground from trying to fix too many injuries on not enough food and sleep. Half the fingers of his left hand were broken, he sported a black eye, bruises in various states of repair littered his torso and legs, and his wrists were raw from the shackles’ rub. And that was only the small wounds.

“The caf’s for you, if you want it.”

Hux’s disdain morphed into incredulity, underpinned with a spark of anger. What was this, some sort of heavy handed ploy? It was clearly either drugged or an attempt to soften him up after so much had been disallowed him. At least the sessions beginning with knuckles or the arc of a stun rod didn’t insult his intelligence.

None of the three or so standard weeks they’d had him in this maze of metal and duracrete had been pleasant. There were no windows in the facility, wherever the hell it was, and no way to objectively tell time with the erratic light-dark cycle in his cell. They’d stripped him of his uniform on arrival in favor of inmate blues, depriving him of the metaphorical armor he’d worn for more than a decade and leaving him nondescript and ungroomed. When the beatings and coercion and relentless questions started, he’d borne them with the resolve of a man too stubborn to accept that his lessers might succeed in breaking him.

The woman sighed with mock exasperation and reclaimed the tin mug, raising it to her lips and taking a slow sip.

“Shame. Looks like I’ll have to drink it myself, then.” She chose a spot very solidly on her side of the table to return it to.

A traitorous twinge of desire flew straight from his tongue to his brain before he could shutter it away. He tried to avoid letting it cloud his schooled expression, choosing instead what he hoped was a less obvious outlet for his roiling resentment. He dug his nails into his palms. On the fingers that could move, at least.

“We are beginning to grow impatient,” the interrogator finally began, clasping her hands together before her. Her tone held a jaunty familiarity, as though they were old friends having a chat. “Though the others do enjoy… _visiting_ you, the pleasure quickly fades without results.”

Hux didn’t respond, clinging to what remained of the defiant silence that characterized his time here. Silence of words, at least; screaming didn’t count. A muscle in his jaw twitched involuntarily.

“This is your last chance to make the choice of talking to us before we go down a very different road with you,” she threatened. He had been treated harshly so far, but Hux knew his captors hadn’t begun to plumb the truly terrifying abysses of torture techniques yet. Part of him had believed them incapable of it.

“Where is Snoke?”

He ignored the question. Something about her _grated_ at him, more so than any of the others had. They were straightforward, unfettered in their hate for the First Order’s most meteoric general, but she hid her sharpness beneath apparent coolness and uncaring restraint. He could feel his once-steely self-control unraveling further under her regard, abrasiveness perched on his tongue. The woman reminded Hux too much of himself, he realized coldly.

He suddenly had the thought that this short interaction was the longest he and a Resistance member had ever been in a room together without them physically hurting him, and something long-waiting finally uncurled in his brain. No one was coming for him here, and if they did, it would be to eliminate a liability. He had always known this. It was standard protocol. And although this current one-sided conversation was surprisingly civil, it wouldn’t last. To them, he was nothing but a safe to be relentlessly cracked and then discarded for crimes against sapients. He was a dead man either way. The least he could do was stop pointlessly fighting the inevitable and make it entertaining instead.

A wretched, bubbling laugh rose unbidden through his throat, spilling over into the room. Lank strands of hair fell over his eyes as he shook, full-bodied and unrestrained. The interrogator regarded him with something akin to shock.

They wanted him to talk? Fine. He’d talk.

“I’m not going to tell you anything.” The words came unexpectedly harsh over his raw vocal chords.

“Well now this is something, isn’t it.” His interrogator sat back, sipping the caf with a raised eyebrow. “I’m disappointed. You sounded much more intimidating in the holo recordings.”

Hux fixed her with a scowl that could make grown soldiers shudder. She didn’t flinch.

“You’d be better off just killing me,” he prodded, a bright and savage glint growing his eyes despite the exhaustion. “The Republic wants my head.”

“You know we can’t do that,” the woman tutted.

“What _I_ know is that I’m not getting out of here alive,” Hux growled, gesturing violently to the room with a metal slam of shackles. “It would be more humane to just cut to the chase and do it. I thought you lot prided yourselves on sapient rights. Or has the Resistance finally admitted that all it’s capable of is sowing chaos?”

“Sapient rights no longer apply to you. You ensured that when you obliterated the Hosnian system.”

“And it was _beautiful,”_ Hux snarled, baring a vicious grin.

The slap stung like fire, wrenching his head around and driving his lip against his teeth. The taste of iron welled into his mouth, blood filling it hot and fast. He spat disdainfully onto the concrete floor before bringing his glare back up to his interrogator’s.

“Oh, did I hit a nerve?” he hissed. “I’m _so_ sorry.”

The woman caught his chin with a punishing grip, fingers digging into the overgrown scruff on his jaw as she jerked him forward against the edge of the table. Her eyes searched his, seeking something that she clearly did not find.

“So much power and so little regard for life. Well, before, at least. Tell me, how did it feel to be betrayed by your own soldiers?”

That was a question to which Hux would not grant her the privilege of an answer. Rage churned inside him, great waves of it, crashing against the Resistance, the treason corrupting his ranks, the damnable shackles and this hard-eyed woman currently bruising his face. The last of his self-preservation and control crumbled beneath the burning tide.

“Who was it? A lover? Children?” He practically spat, lips curling back from red-stained teeth. “Maybe it was the whole happy family, all gone up in ash. I wonder how much they screamed when they died. If they thought of you as they burned with the rest of your damn Republic-”

His forehead met the table with a crack, choking his words and leaving him momentarily stunned. Fingers wrenched in his hair, dragging him up and back. Hux braced for the countering bite of metal into his wrists, but it never came: he realized with a jolt that his shackles had been released from the table. He crashed backwards onto the floor, the chair he’d been on skittering away towards a corner.

Hux’s body tried to hitch out a gasp, but the white-hot pain surging from his hip strangled his breath. The blaster wound hidden beneath his waistband had taken the brunt of the impact, stiff and barely healing despite treatment. He rolled to his stomach in an attempt to ride out the shock, arms trapped awkwardly beneath him as he sucked in air.

Boots scuffed near his head.

“I always thought you’d have a mouth on you,” the interrogator crooned. “Remind me again how well it screams.”

Hux gritted his teeth and attempted to push himself up through the throbbing, only to find himself sent sprawling again by a kick to the gut. Before he could struggle to right himself a second time, the woman’s knee came down hard into his lower back. A strangled noise escaped him, and then her whole weight was on him, one hand pinning his shackles over his head and the other sliding down his side. Her fingers found the cauterized crater and dug. Hard.

Hux screamed.

 

 

It was a shame, really, how he’d gotten into this situation.

Another officer had probably been promoted to General after his capture, replacing a broken cog that had begun to crack long ago, but he highly doubted they would hold up to the job. Starkiller’s ultimate destruction had soured his already tenuous relationship with Snoke, and the Supreme Leader did not forgive easily. Never mind that _Ren_ was the one truly at fault for that fiasco, forever protected by Snoke’s damnable attachment to the capricious darkness he wielded. Even as Hux had claimed system after system in the wake of the New Republic’s shattering, he was hounded by the old man’s lingering displeasure.

Eleven months after Starkiller, the First Order stood poised at the edge of the Inner Rim, maintained blockades on three of the four hyperspace trade routes in the galactic south, and had won or forced the allegiance of a small majority of galactically distal worlds. The Resistance’s numbers had bloomed after the destruction of the Galactic Senate, the rest of the Republic and many neutral systems finally ceasing to underestimate the First Order, but in most cases it had only been enough to draw out conflicts rather than win them. Starkiller, while vastly powerful, had not proven strictly necessary to their success when faced with a fragmented enemy. Financial and physical support from revitalized Old Empire sympathizers had more than compensated.

Hux stood at an easy parade rest, contemplating the view from the bridge as the _Finalizer_ drifted in fleet formation around Vandelhelm II. The momentum of accumulated victories thrummed through his flagship’s crew, only bolstered further by the sight of vast swathes of flame streaking the planet’s night side.  They had successfully neutralized the Republic-controlled shipyards it was famous for, though at cost.

Hux heard the click of boot heels behind him, then the _shuff_ of Unamo’s snappy salute.

“General, I have an incoming transmission patched on from the CIC. It’s from the Resistance.”

“Put it through.” Hux let a curious frown briefly occupy his face. Direct transmissions were rare and, more importantly, traceable.

The one true strategic thorn in Hux’s side for the last several months had been their inability to corner the Resistance’s high leadership, long since fled from D’Qar. Beyond reports that a certain plucky x-wing pilot had led Rapier Squadron in the Battle of Riflor and several outdated sightings of the defected stormtrooper in the Gordian Reach, he had nothing to go on. Ren’s quest to locate the two fugitive Jedi had been similarly fruitless, despite numerous successful sting operations with his Knights. Organa hid her people well. His only consolation was that the Order was progressively squeezing their operable space into a rat trap that would soon, he hoped, snap shut.

The bridge’s holoprojector hummed to life, placing the blue figure of a short, serious woman in front of Hux. Organa. The human hum on the deck dropped to dead silence.

“General Hux,” the holo began, words clipped and expressionless. “In light of recent strategic losses, we of the Resistance and New Republic United Forces extend an offer to negotiate the terms of a nonaggression agreement. While we still do not acknowledge the First Order as a legitimate political entity, we recognize your military power and have voted to proceed on such grounds. We are willing to accept a date and location of your choosing, provided you select one in neutral space, for delegations to meet. I will wait for your response.”

The message cut out.

“Transmission source?”

“Blind proxy relay satellite, sir. We can answer, but any signals beyond the relay become too diffuse to track.”

“Typical.” Hux would call Leia Organa may things, but stupid was not one of them. “Send the designation code to my datapad, I need to deliberate. Trasso, you have the con.”

 

Hux and Ren fought that night cycle, the sort of taut, red-faced conflict that always cumulated in needy, violent sex. This time it had been something about damaged shuttles, but it didn’t really matter. Ren had returned from his training with Snoke a less conflicted man, knife-sharp in his use of the Force and no longer as prone to decimating troopers and equipment in fiery tantrums. However, the bursting charge cylinder that was the Knight and the General hurtling into conflict had not changed in the slightest. On very visceral level, they both craved it.

“You know, you may actually be something close to _useful_ now,” Hux hummed, fingers carding idly through the dark fan of Ren’s hair. What sheets remained on the bed lay hopelessly tangled and covered in mess, framing two pale bodies in the low planetlight. He was too lazy to kick the Knight out.

“Was that a backhanded compliment on my recent performance?” Ren lay on his side halfway down the bed, turned towards Hux’s supine form.

“You know what I mean, you fool.”

Ren sighed. “The Knights have always been useful.”

Hux snorted, refusing to dignify a real response. This exchange would predictably spiral towards another old argument, one they both knew Hux had the right of. He was too preoccupied to re-tread long beaten ground right now.

They lay silently for a while, lost in thought, until Hux felt a feather-light pressure at the base of his brain.

“Get out of my head,” he snapped, closing his fingers and jerking Ren out of concentration. His bedmate hissed and the feather slipped away.

“You’re going to accept her offer to negotiate.”

“Yes.”

“It could be a trap, you know.”

“The notion has not escaped me. If they want to broker a deal, they’ll have to accept the most unfavorable meeting conditions I can possibly arrange. She can’t maneuver if I control the board.”

Ren leaned in and nipped at Hux’s ribs, spreading a long-fingered hand over his abdomen.

“I’m including you in the diplomatic detail.”

“I’d have no use there. You know I didn’t inherit her political tongue.”

“You don’t need a tongue to stand in the corner and look intimidating.”

“I’d rather use it to do more interesting things,” Ren purred as he migrated further upwards, languidly licking a nipple and sending a spark directly to Hux’s groin before going for his collarbone.

Hux flipped them with a growl, caging Ren against the bed.

“You realize that this could be the culmination of all we’ve worked for? A chance to truly throttle the Resistance, cripple them into inaction. That pack of liars and insurgents is all that’s left between us and restoring the glory of the Old Empire for ourselves.”

The Knight’s hand came up to drag fingernails over Hux’s scalp before fisting in his hair and pulling sideways. He resisted, savoring the burn, and fixed Ren with a dark glare.

“Stars, you never turn off. Just let it go for once, just for one kriffing watch.”

“Or what?”

“I’ll wreck your quarters. For old time’s sake.” Ren’s sharp grin glinted beneath him, joining the bright sheen of his sweaty skin in the polygon of light from the viewport. The Knight’s breath hitched softly as Hux ran one hand possessively down his flank in response, adding another breathy layer over the ever-present machine hum of three thousand meters of warship. Whatever this arrangement was between them, while definitely not a _relationship_ , had grown in the past months into something taut and encompassing and strangely, in its own violent way, gentle beneath the prickliness.

“I’d like to see you try,” Hux hissed, before pressing Ren back down with a punishing kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is already finished and Chapter 2 will go up on 3/10. Kudos/feedback/comments are appreciated!
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](http://sundogsailor.tumblr.com/) too.


	2. Chapter 2

The meeting was set to take place aboard a small First Order corvette holding position in a vast swathe of dead space near the Prindaar system. While technically unclaimed territory, the Order had the advantage of numbers to patrol the surrounding region. With the Resistance’s ever-increasing reliance on hidden planetary bases, they couldn’t hope to exercise any tactical control here. The Finalizer and her accompanying frigates loomed four hundred klicks away, visible as imposing grey shapes off the corvette’s port side.

Hux had sent his response to Organa only two standard days ago, allowing her delegation a minimum of time to arrive for negotiations. He wanted them off-balance, unprepared, and feeling their disadvantage at every possible turn. To him, this would not be a “nonaggression agreement.” It would be the accepting of a surrender, in practice if not in name. He had notified Snoke of the proceedings as well but received no response; as Hux led the Order toward tactical victory, the man had become progressively more withdrawn into whatever dark dealings fixated him. He resented it at some level and was of the opinion that Snoke should take more interest in the proceedings, but shook the preoccupation from his head.

“Sir, we have confirmation of a Resistance scout vessel warping out of hyperspace in sector C-12,” the corvette’s commanding officer, a recently promoted Colonel, informed him. ”They’ll arrive in seventeen minutes if they maintain their current trajectory and speed.”

“Good. Initiate contact for docking in bay three. Be very clear that we will not hesitate to fire if they deviate from plan.”

“Yes, Sir.” She saluted, then turned back to manage her bridge.

Hux strode out, Ren peeling off the wall and following as they made their way to the docking bay. He wore his full assembly of black regalia, the new helmet only slightly varied from his previous one, withholding none of his capacity to physically intimidate. Phasma had opted unsurprisingly to remain aboard the _Finalizer,_ preferring to provide much-needed troop management to distant battlefields than waste her time, as she put it, "standing uselessly in a circle of diplomats." 

Hux could nearly _feel_ the waves of tension rolling off Ren’s form, the man practically stalking through the companionway beside him. As soon as they rounded the corner into the turbolift, he punched the door close button and slammed the Knight against the bulkhead by his cowl.

“Do _not_ screw this up for us,” he hissed softly, face inches from the impassive visor of the mask. “I don’t care if she’s your mother or about any other personal vendettas you have with her cohort. Do. Not. Screw this up.”

“I can control myself,” Ren growled, low even through the modulator, and Hux knew he meant it. He wrenched the General away, drawing himself to his full height. “She’s nothing to me as a mother. And while I may have vendettas, I’m not the only one.”

Hux grimaced, backing off and selecting the docking bay as their destination. That much, at least, was true. He wouldn’t deny that his drive to root out the Resistance’s leadership had been partially fueled by resentment towards the motley group that had undone Starkiller. Everything would have been so much more efficient without their meddling.

 

They emerged into the small hangar, only big enough to hold perhaps four TIE fighters side by side. Hux claimed a spot dead center, falling into a patient parade rest. Ren flanked him several paces back, and both were bracketed by pair of stormtroopers. The rest of the squadron stood stoically along the catwalk surrounding the lower bay, transferred from the _Finalizer_ specifically for this negotiation.

Landing claxons blared, preceding the arrival of the Resistance ship. It was a small, unimpressive looking thing, though undoubtedly fast, and made the atmo shields shiver as it entered from the void of space. Chill poured off the hull as it attempted to equalize with the interior temperature. Organa disembarked first, even shorter in person than the holo but no less composed, and Hux heard Ren stand up straighter. Two more figures emerged behind her, both dressed in tunics that passed in the Republic as formal wear. The first was FN-2187, his face unmistakable, and the second was the scavenger-turned-Jedi. After all this time, he still was not aware of her name.

“General Organa,” Hux greeted, hands folded behind his back and face steely.

“General Hux. I hope you’ll be more pleasant to deal with than the other Imperial-bred officers I’ve entertained in my life, though I somehow doubt it." She returned his gaze needle for knife, disdain evident. If she cared that Ren loomed darkly at the heel of her First Order counterpart, it didn't show.

“Pat them down.”

The two troopers stepped forward, and she acquiesced to the weapons check. She raised an eyebrow at him over their white armor as they worked and Hux sighed, pulling the small blaster he carried from its holster and sliding it across the floor towards the aft bulkhead. Him being disarmed didn’t change the firepower ratio here in the slightest. The troopers finished with her and moved on to the others, who handled the pat-down far less comfortably. One of them relieved FN-2187 of a pistol, but they found nothing on the scavenger.

“Well, shall we negotiate? I’m pleased your Resistance has acknowledged the futility of continuing its ill-considered fight.”

“No. That was never my intent.”

Something instinctual lurched in Hux’s chest a moment too late.

“Finn!” Organa’s shout echoed through the bay, and suddenly the trooper with the confiscated handgun was tossing it back to FN-2187. Hux froze with shock and then icy rage as thirty rifle sights leveled on him and Ren from the catwalk. Confused shouts came from some of the squadron, only to fall back into silence as their compatriots turned muzzles on them as well.

“Stand down,” Hux bellowed, face livid. “Of all the bloody stupid, hutt-brained things I’ve seen in my life- I said _stand down!_ ”

No one breathed, locked on a precipice by the fraught atmosphere blooming between the two opposing generals. The back of Hux’s neck prickled, not in fear but from the sheer angry static Ren was throwing off behind him.

“We’re taking this ship, _General,_ ” FN-2187 announced, a cathartic smile breaking his face behind his raised blaster. “These aren’t your ‘troopers anymore.”

Kriff.

Several things happened at once, and the bay exploded into chaos.

Hux slammed sideways, thrown by an explosive discharge of Force as Ren surged forward, deflecting the blaster bolt from FN-2187’s sidearm towards the catwalk with a mere sweep of his hand. Rifle fire erupted from above as 'troopers turned on each other, underpinned by the ignition hiss of lightsabers.

He rolled to his feet and snatched up the blaster he’d slid away, silently thanking whatever powers that be that Ren threw him aft towards it. An armored body thudded limply to the ground beside him, only pushing him to bolt faster into the cover of a small technician’s alcove.

Hux fired three precise shots with a grimace, dropping the same number of stormtroopers on the opposite catwalk. He tried to target only those who acted hostile, but their uniformity of appearance made it nearly impossible to tell loyal from traitorous. How the _hell_ had this gone unnoticed? And on the _Finalizer_ , of all ships? Organa and her cohort infuriated him, unwilling to see reason and slippery enough to follow through with their recklessly bold ploys. But this could still be salvaged, the dissent dealt with.

He wrenched his commlink out of his belt and hit the transmit button.

“Bridge, we have a-”

“Hux!”

Ren’s shout jerked his attention to the blind spot over his shoulder, just in time to intercept the trooper bearing down on him from around the corner. Before she could take the line of fire, Hux ducked low and grappled her rifle away, sending her crashing to the ground in the process. A shot to the back of the neck kept her there. His comm skittered out of reach, lost in the altercation, but the call had been enough and the ship’s general alarm blared out through the space, activated by some quick officer on the bridge. Hux felt a small portion of his consternation lift, only to have it come crashing back down twice as hard when the alarm cut out moments later.

Ren swirled around white-clad corpses in the middle of the bay, his properly rebuilt saber crashing hot against the double-bladed green of the scavenger’s. She matched him blow for blow, bone-deep hurt hidden beneath her concentrated expression. A third figure launched in from the periphery to rejoin the fight, and Hux could hardly believe his eyes: FN-2187, handling a blue lightsaber like he was born for it. He swore and laid out two more troopers on the elevated walkway, doing all he could to protect both himself and the Knight despite the sporadic suppressive fire hitting the alcove. Although few of the defected troopers dared to shoot down into the bay now for fear of hitting the Jedi, he knew that four of the squadron had trained as sharpshooters.

Hux tossed away the now-empty sidearm in favor of the dead stormtrooper's rifle, reassessing the scene. A small corps of Resistance fighters had tumbled out of the ship unnoticed, and fell into formation around Organa as he watched. He needed to get out of the hangar, and fast. Holding position and waiting for the corvette’s security troopers wasn’t an option, if they were even reliable anymore.

A hasty glance at the compartment ID inscribed over the alcove told him that there should be a bay access door only ten frames down the side of the space from his current position. A fueling console stood conveniently halfway between him and his goal, offering temporary cover on the way. It was risky, but he should have enough time to reach it assuming he went _now._  

Hux steeled himself and then, at a lull in the blaster fire, broke for it.

He didn’t make it.

Searing pain exploded from his hip, right leg spasming as an impact threw him spinning mid-step. Hux shouted, hitting the floor hard and rolling several meters, rifle landing a pace away. Ren roared in response, knocking FN-2187 aside with a brutal parry. He rushed towards Hux only to be intercepted and beaten back by the scavenger, losing ground as the two Jedi pressed him further out into the middle of the bay in a crashing whirl of sparks.

Hux scrambled for the blaster with an adrenaline-fueled lunge, launching himself as far as he could with his good leg as the thud of running boots grew closer. His fingers found the grip, flipping over and shouldering it just in time to confront the Resistance fighter taking point. The man dove forward and slammed the muzzle sideways, diverting his fire so it only singed the hair by his ear, and then wrenched Hux’s hand from the trigger with a sickening twist. More fighters rushed up behind the first, filling his vision as he struggled.

 _“Hux!”_ Ren screamed.

And then a rifle stock crashed into his head, and the world went dark.

 

He woke blearily, taking several seconds to realize that he could still hear the muffled noise of conflict. It took several more for the pain to register, after which it became very hard to focus on anything else.

They dumped him down on the sole plates when he started to thrash, the animal part of his brain taking over and kicking his body into panic mode. Faces swam against the overhead lights, not all of them human, and he snarled.

“Somebody get Datson-”

“Get his arms!”

“Pfassking hell-”

“Datson’s not coming! I’m here-”

Then they were pinning him down, ripping off his jacket and pushing up his sleeve. Hux almost didn’t process the bite of the needle until after they’d removed it, whatever they’d injected already coursing through his bloodstream. Very quickly he felt a rush, as though he was beginning to float off the floor, muscles relaxing and turning into lead as the pain bled away. The panic lingered, shuttered away with everything else his mind and body were screaming at him, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Absurdly, he almost felt like laughing. Hux was not a man who laughed.

“Get him somewhere locked,” said a Sullustan, fuzzed out at the edge of Hux’s vision. “He’s valuable _alive_ , you understand?”

Hands were lifting him, and suddenly he was so, so tired.

“Hell, he’s tall. Pick up his legs-“

“Rey!” New voices, farther away, familiar over the slam of feet.

“We can’t-”

“Go Poe, go!”

Hux wondered idly where they were going, but the thought quickly slipped from his mind. He supposed it didn’t really matter, anyway.

The ship lurched, and he let his eyes slip blissfully closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter this time, just because of how scenes fell. Chapter 3 will go up on 3/12.


	3. Chapter 3

Much later, lying alone an erratically lit cell with nothing but his wounds and bitter anger to keep him company, Hux had tried to recall the number of times he’d felt the scout ship lurch into hyperspace through his numbing high. Even excluding those instances that must have occurred while he was unconscious, it was a count so large that he doubted even the Order’s most astute tracing technician could parse the ship’s trail.

Organa had visited him, only once, four days after they’d dragged him down into this prison. She had informed him softly of his simultaneous indictment, conviction, and sentencing, largely out of duty but also with some degree of absurd pity. The verdicts been expedited through a military tribunal without his presence, which was just as well. He wouldn’t have testified for them anyway. Hux had known full well for years what judgement would be passed on him by the First Order’s enemies should they ever have the chance. The swiftness of the proceedings at least gave him some hope for the continued efficacy of the Order, if not for his own fate.

She'd left him staring a thousand meters into blank space, stormy faced and ever-silent and not yet weaned from whatever they were giving him for the pain. An unkind paraphrasing of her words echoed through his mind: he was to be kept alive until no longer strategically useful and then brought to justice, permanently, for his war crimes. Though he may be brought low in circumstance, Hux refused to match the situation with his mindset. Only later would something bright and desperately reckless begin to hatch silently inside him.

The next day, he’d made the acquaintance of his first interrogator.

 

 

Agony wracked Hux’s body, eyes watering as his screams burned out and choked back into strangled half-gasps. With one final dig, the woman released his hip and took her weight off. He rolled defensively to his left side, arms curling in and smearing fresh blood across his baggy shirt. The cuffs had finally broken the skin on his wrists in his writhing.

His interrogator stepped back and circled him, chest heaving as she tried to bring her anger back to heel.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” he finally mustered, a hoarse cough wrenching itself violently from his body, “to make me talk. But I doubt you have the guts.”

“You could make this much easier on yourself if you wanted.”

“Go to hell.” Laughter lilted manically back into Hux’s voice.

“Where is Snoke?”

Hux spat, some of the reddened saliva catching in his scruff. Nothing really mattered anymore. Maybe he could wind her up far enough that she’d do something she’d regret, put an end to this pointless cycle of back and forths and spare Hux the bother.

She reached down and wrenched a hand into his sweaty hair, pulling him towards his knees.

 _No,_ Hux's pride snapped, not like that. She was not allowed to make him kneel.

His hands flew up to grab her arm and he yelled, rage channeling unexpected strength to his exhausted muscles. He dropped his body weight down as hard as he could and dragged her balance with him, simultaneously destabilizing her footing with a pained kick. She went stumbling towards the wall with a shout of surprised anger, quickly catching herself against it and wheeling back.

“You _bastard!”_

His mind reeled, high off the release of fighting back after weeks of silent endurance. The table wasn’t far, so Hux dragged himself back against it for whatever meager security it might offer. He didn’t care that his outburst of aggression wouldn’t amount to anything because right now in this moment, this pure blissful moment, everything was shot through with reckless exhilaration.

He blocked her first strike with upheld arms, only for the second to lay him back out on the floor with a crack. The cup of caf clattered down on top of him, soaking his pant leg with fragrant warmth. Hux snarled through the haze of impact, both unwilling and unable to keep a dangerously cracked smile off his face.

In riling his interrogator up and making her lose control, he had gained a twisted, sideways variety of it for himself.

Her boot snapped into his belly and he curled over, protecting his head and enduring. He lost count of the blows, erratic chokes of pain passing through his lips. At some point something shifted jarringly in his abdomen, drowned out by the strikes and the scrape of his hip over the floor.

“Lieutenant, stop!” He hadn’t heard the door open, but two guards were suddenly holding the interrogator back from him. Her face held a hot flush and he locked eyes with her, wheezing defiantly as he rolled to his back.

Then they were on him too, clutching his upper arms and heaving his broken body up, through the hall, and back to his cell. They laid him down gingerly on the small cot, the dark-complexioned one’s fingers twitching at his sidearm as his partner unlocked Hux’s shackles.

“We’ll send a medical droid,” she said, stepping away as soon as he was free. “Don’t break it.”

Hux released one more weak laugh and let his head sink down on the sheets. Exhaustion claimed him immediately after the adrenaline faded, dragging him down into a serene abyss. He dreamed, but the scenes and feelings slipped from his fingers as quickly as they came.

 

He woke gradually, sensations pinging softly against his consciousness until they demanded his attention with urgency. His torso throbbed, discouraging him from sitting up even if he’d wanted to. Fresh bandages had appeared on his wrists and hip, but they’d given him nothing for the pain. Typical.

The torrent of rage and spite and self-destructive abandon once so bright and burning now hung shrouded far away in his mind, replaced by an eerily empty calm. He had felt sapped and blank after other sessions but never quite like this. Hux stared at the ceiling as his thoughts swam in slow circles, counting the wall panels and listening for muffled voices passing beyond his confines.

He wondered idly where Ren was, a pointless thread of conjecture that he found himself returning to semi-frequently. He resented him, frustrated that it was himself, not the Knight, stranded in enemy hands. Hux would unenthusiastically admit that Ren had matured since returning from Snoke, but in his mind he was still so strongly the impulsive, dangerously frenetic and conflicted child of a man he’d first clashed with years ago as a colonel. On another level, though, he begrudged him and his absence out of a petty desire not to be alone. Absurdly and against his better judgement, Ren was the only person, male or female, that Hux had ever allowed any closer than a never-mentioned one night stand.

He could still hear Ren’s final scream of his name, the memory lodged hard in his brain. He had no idea what had become of him, or the corvette, or anything else in that fiasco of a meeting with Organa. If he was alive, did Ren even care that Hux was gone beyond the logistical nightmare it must have caused and the loss of a good fuck? Probably not.

Personal connections only brought pain in his way of life. His father had told a teenaged Hux that once.

At some point a tray clattered in beneath the door. The food was cold by the time his hunger overpowered his lethargy and he hauled himself off the cot to get it, but he managed to finish the meager bread and tasteless supplement mush anyway using his uninjured hand. What remained of his pride would not allow him to starve himself.

Hours passed.

The lights shut off.

Hux reached to his face and toyed with his split lip for what must have been the thousandth time. He’d been entirely sincere when he’d essentially asked his interrogator to off him and save them both the trouble, though he’d known there was no way she’d oblige while rational. He felt as though he were another person, some disinterested observer watching the life of General Hux as it came to a prolonged end after a wrong choice in one of those choose your own adventure holos from his youth. Contemplating his own death was something of a novel past time for him. Hunger gnawed at his belly again, a constant companion in the calmer moments since he’d been here. He ignored it.

Just as he’d abandoned the crusade of repressing his feelings into nothingness, it now seemed as though there was nothing there _to_ feel. That should have concerned him on some level, because even he with all his control and routine recognized that anger and lust and thirst for satisfaction drove many of his ambitions and choices in life.

Suddenly he realized his hand was trembling violently against his face, and he pulled it away. Was this some sort of disjointed shock response? He grunted and painfully maneuvered himself into a sitting position against the cot’s wall, futilely straining to pick out his limbs in the pitch darkness. The sweat drenching his back cooled on contact with the duracrete, sending a shiver down his spine, and suddenly he was hit by a wave of dizziness.

He hadn’t felt like this since his days at the Academy when he-

Oh.

So _that’s_ what had broken in his abdomen.

His head started pounding and so Hux lay back down, nervously smoothing his shirt out until the shaking became too much and he fisted his good hand into the fabric. He tried to roll towards the wall but found himself exceptionally weak, his limbs struggling to respond as though he’d been dropped onto a high-gravity planet without warning. Phantom shapes danced over his vision in the darkness as he stared at nothing, attempting and failing to keep his mind focused on any possible linear path of thought. He slipped gradually into drowsy incoherence.

Maybe fate, in its characteristically twisted way, had decided to smile on him after all. His interrogator may have killed him without realizing it.

A metallic taste swept across his tongue, not blood—he hadn’t bitten himself, had he?—and then-

 

Bright lights glared in his eyes, leaving little specks as they cracked open.

Damn.

Soft sheets and a pillow supported him in a bed, a proper bed, albeit a generic medical-issue one. His body sank into the comfort, but his mind lashed out at its provision. He was not safe here and he didn’t _want_ the false relief of small things being granted to him. It only served as a reminder that they could take it all away again.

IV lines hooked into both of his forearms, running down from several fluid stands. The bags on his left, one labeled gluca-something, routed through a complicated little box before their contents reached the catheter. Surprisingly soft padded cuffs prevented him from trying to tamper with them, keeping his wrists close to the bed’s rails. Other various equipment filled the small white-walled room including a chirping heart monitor and a life signs console.

He tried to sit up further off the half-inclined mattress, but a loose strap across his chest kept him from getting very far. His feet felt similarly restrained when he tested them, though with a decent amount of mobility. His injuries still throbbed dully insistent warnings to his brain.

Muffled electronic beeps filtered through the door by the foot of the bed, warning Hux before it hissed open. The stout, white coated man who entered reminded him vaguely of a commander he’d had ejected out an airlock once. If only. He pulled a stool up to the bed and sat down tiredly, laying his datapad on the equipment before fixing Hux with an easy look of detached assessment. Kriff, he hated doctors.

“How long have you had the artificial pancreas?”

Hux turned away and the man sighed.

“Look, you had a hypoglycemic seizure. Knocked you right out before we figured out what the issue was.”

“How long was-“ the words croaked hoarsely in his dry mouth.

“Thirteen hours.”

“You should have left me.”

“You almost died.”

“Almost? What a bloody shame.”

The doctor pinched his nose in exasperation. He opened his mouth to say something and then thought better of it, reconsidering for a moment and then sighing again, this time heavier.

“I’m obligated by my physician’s oaths to put in a request for surgery to fix or replace whatever’s broken, but I doubt it’ll be approved. You have some very expensive hardware inside you.”

“Well there’s no sense wasting credits fixing a dead man, is there.”

“Believe it or not, not everyone wants your head on a stake. Despite how infuriating you are.”

Hux snorted.

“I’m serious. There are groups appealing for you to only be locked away for a very, very long time once you’ve broken. Again, speaking as a doctor, I’d suggest you stop dragging out the questioning process. But don’t mistake my professionalism for concern.”

Now that gave Hux pause for a moment. The possibility of anyone advocating for a man who’d only _begun_ by destroying an entire system seemed absurd, but it was the type of absurdity that he wouldn’t put past some New Republic politicians. He shook the thought from his head. This too was probably calculated, a ploy to maneuver him to the Resistance’s advantage, a grander version of the cup of caf from earlier.

“I’d rather stick with the death sentence.”

The doctor simply shook his head and tucked the datapad back beneath his arm before heading to the door.

“You’ll be kept here until your glucose levels can be stabilized satisfactorily without monitoring, whatever the method. Enjoy it while you can.”

 

A nurse brought him a tray of food later, allowing him one hand free to eat with it in his lap. The cup of water was bliss, slaking the thirst brought on more by his tacky mouth than any real dehydration thanks to a saline drip. The rest was standardly unappetizing fare. He tried unsuccessfully to ignore being watched, old habits of eating in privacy dying hard. At least with the holorecorders in his cell he’d been able to pretend he was alone.

He was just polishing off the bowl of oatmeal when he felt it, an indescribably faint pressure at the base of his skull that was both and terrifying and exhilarating in equal parts.

_Hux?_

“Kriff!”

The spoon clattered from his hand as he jerked up against his restraints, wildly searching the room. The heartrate monitor spiked, its screen turning orange. No one was there but the nurse, her eyes narrowing.

“I’ve gone and really lost it, haven’t I. Oh, hells.” He couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out, reflexively running his hand back through his hair in consternation. The needle tugged uncomfortably in his skin, the tape holding it flush peeling a bit and letting the assembly jostle. This couldn’t actually be happening, could it?

The nurse was suddenly pulling his arm back down towards its restraint. He resisted, but she overpowered him with only moderate effort.

“Get off me!”

“Then don’t make trouble,” she retorted, locking the cuff in place.

_I need you to calm down._

“You need _me_ to-,”

She snapped a pair of gloves on and selected a syringe from the counter, flipping open one of the injection ports branching from the IV tube. Hux suddenly realized what he probably looked like, wild eyed and unexplainably belligerent.

“No! No, I- You don’t need to do that.”

She gave him a hard look.

“ _Please,”_ he gritted out, forcing himself to lean back into the bed and take long, deep breaths. Now was not the time he wanted to get knocked out. The heart monitor trilled, its screen changing back to green.

The nurse took the mostly-finished tray from his lap instead, passing it to someone outside before settling back in her chair.

“What-“ Hux hissed, as quietly as physically possible.

_Don’t speak. I can hear you fine in your head._

He swallowed hard and closed his eyes, forcing himself to relax.

_How the hell are you doing this?_

_With the Force, you idiot._

It took all of Hux’s willpower not to roll his eyes. This was definitely happening. Despite all his great powers of imagination, only the real, flesh and blood Ren was capable of delivering a petty barb _just so_ to get under his skin. The Knight was speaking to him inside his own head, and he wasn’t capable of parsing all the implications of that just now. One of them felt dangerously like hope.

_No, I mean, you’re not here. Don’t you need to be near someone to talk to them like this?_

_I can extend my range if I have to. Where are you? Why didn’t you answer earlier?_

_Earlier?_

_Yes, earlier._

_I must have been unconscious._

Hux felt an ethereal shimmer of frustration and anger from the Knight.

_Where are you, Hux?_

_Medical quarters. Beyond that I don’t know._ He envisioned the room around him as vividly as he could, hoping that Ren could receive images as well as words. _What happened after they took me? Is the fleet still intact? Has Snoke-_

_Questions later. I’m getting you out._

Hux’s heart lurched.

_There’s lots of duracrete, no windows, cool temperatures. Look for smaller or camouflaged access points that lead underground. I’ve seen repeat faces among the guards but not consistently, so the personnel complement is likely only moderate._

_I’ll be there soon, I can feel the concentration of people._

_Ren?_

_What?_

_Don’t screw this up for us._

A flash of derision, and then the pressure of Ren’s contact vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter goes up on the 14th! Thanks for all your wonderful comments so far.


	4. Chapter 4

Twenty minutes later the nurse left the room.

Fifteen minutes after that, an alarm started ringing.

Hux forced himself to remain calm as the din hammered into his ears, scraping back some of the shattered pieces of his abandoned self-control and arranging them into a semi-functioning jigsaw. Hope was blooming terrible and unstoppable in his chest, giving him something to hang on to and use to drown the cornered animal that inhabited his psyche. He would preserve its ferocity for when he needed it, however. Hux was not a wasteful man, even in this.

Ren was here. Ren was coming to get him _out_. But he’d truly believe it only when he actually saw him.

A scream penetrated in from the hall. Moments later the nurse came tumbling back inside, panting and disheveled. Her expression, grim and determined with a twinge of fatalistic abandon, set alarm bells clamoring in Hux’s head as she rushed to the cabinets over the counter, frantically searching for something in the shelves. She slammed a vial down and ripped a fresh syringe out of its casing.

The metal of the door caved inward with a wrenching crack. The nurse spun with a yelp, fumbling with the equipment, but didn’t drop it. She punctured the vial and drew far more of the liquid into the barrel than could possibly be safe.

“Oh, no,” Hux growled, struggling frantically against his bonds. “No!”

The plating slammed further inwards. She inserted the needle into an IV port.

Hux swore.

The door finally gave way with a metallic shriek and a mass of black billowed through it, the lightsaber he wielded filling the room with a humming red glow. The nurse flew back with a scream, cracking against the opposite wall near the ceiling and slumping silently to the floor, a smear of blood trailing down it from the back of her head.

Ren, damn the man, was at this moment the best thing Hux had ever seen in his life.

“The IV,” Hux shouted. “Ren, take out the IV!” He nodded to the one on his right, the nurse’s needle still hanging from the tubing with its plunger half-depressed.

Ren moved, holstering his saber and removing a glove as he rushed to the bed. He slipped the needle out carefully, letting it fall and drip onto the floor as he moved on to the other side and then Hux’s wrists.

Hux breathed out long and slow in blind relief, sitting up as soon as Ren released him.

The Knight stood still at the foot of the bed, face hidden by his mask but his body language telegraphing uncertainty. Hux knew what Ren saw: a bruised and beaten man, haggard and small without his uniform, eyes half-obscured by lank hair and pressing bloody bedsheets against the puncture wounds on his arms. If he had a mirror, Hux was sure that he’d barely recognize himself.

“I suppose we aren’t even with saving each other’s lives anymore, now.”

“We need to go,” Ren said, voice dark and angry beneath the modulation. “Can you stand?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Try,” he encouraged, helping Hux maneuver to the edge of the bed and detaching the rest of the monitoring equipment.

“Get her bag,” Hux ordered, seeing that the nurse had been wearing a satchel at her hip. “Do you have a first aid kit?”

“On my ship-“

“Good. Bag.” Ren stepped wordlessly over to retrieve it.

Hux reached back across the bed and detached the mess of fluid sacks and tubing from the left hand stand, verifying that they were labeled as insulin and glucagon. He then hauled himself to his bare feet with a pained hiss, propping himself up against the counter to rifle through the cabinets for the rest of what he needed. Gauze went hastily over the IV wounds with pressure tape, then a handful of syringes and disinfectant pads formed a “take” pile. Hux added a bottle of painkillers as well after knocking one back and resealing the lid.

Ren shouldered the bag as soon as it was full and swept out the door, drawn by a new wave of boot falls and shouting. Hux followed, able to limp fairly quickly if he had a wall to support him, pounding adrenaline focusing his mind and body into action yet again.

“Clear!” Ren called.

The hall outside stank of ozone and burning flesh, bodies lying broken at the junctions of char-marked walls. One moaned weakly only to be silenced by a wrenching slash of the Knight’s lightsaber that pulled a growl of satisfaction from Hux’s throat. Ren stalked over to him and pressed a small, bloodied sidearm into his grip, pried from the fingers of a dead man. He’d be firing with his off hand, but it would suffice.

The path out of the facility was slow and tense, Ren stalking ahead of him like an explosive jungle cat. His movements were all violent releases of pent-up destructive energy, each strike or deflection feeding off the sweeping motions preceding it. Hux found himself transfixed, never having seen the man fight in close quarters at length before. He offered ranged support as able, but spent most of the journey just keeping himself upright as they moved back over debris and carnage left in the wake of Ren’s entry.

Hux gasped when they finally burst from the camouflaged blast doors out onto the planet’s surface. Heat rippled over them, the sparse, craggy orange landscape baked by a low reddish sun. It smelled like dust and something acrid. A laugh choked from his throat and Ren turned to look at him, and Hux cursed the damn inscrutable mask.

“Come on, General,” Ren rumbled. “We’re almost there.”

He dragged him to an outcropping of rocks and the compact speeder hidden among them, loading him on in front of him and kicking the ignition. Hux felt his adrenaline ebb as the bunker’s alarm faded away behind them, few still breathing to respond to it, and he sagged in the seat. At least the painkiller was starting to take effect.

 

They zipped out across several kilometers of scrub until the landscape sloped downwards, funneling the speeder into a winding maze of ravines. Hux’s attention perked back up as they slowed, the gentle deceleration bringing them to rest beneath a wide overhanging ledge, sunlight spilling over it and  diffusing off the opposite wall to give the whole area a soft warm glow. A sleek black shuttle waited in shadow, glossy like a beetle on the canyon floor.

Ren dismounted and helped Hux off, who summarily dropped to the dusty ground and leaned against the speeder’s hull. The Knight started at the clips for the saddlebags on the opposite side, looming large in Hux’s upturned vision.

“We’ll wait here until it’s safe to leave,” Ren started, almost talking to himself as he unloaded. “They radioed for backup while we were inside so we won’t have time to break orbit before air support arrives.”

“Ren.”

The Knight looked down at him.

Hux smoothed a hand over his hip, working himself up to ask the question that had been percolating uncomfortably into his thoughts since they left the bunker.

“Why did you come?”

“What sort of question is-”

Hux hardened his look to pure steel and Ren faltered. When he spoke again, his tone had gone cold.

“Snoke ordered it.”

“Did he order you to do anything else?”

The Knight walked slowly around to Hux’s side of the vehicle—too slowly, Hux thought—and dropped to his haunches before him. A gloved hand came up to brush the hair from his forehead and he flinched back, fervidly trying to pick out anything of Ren’s face beneath the impenetrably dark visor.

“Hux. I need you to let me look in your mind.” He paused. “I’ll do it even if you resist. But it’s easier if you don’t.” Hux closed his eyes and swallowed, expression pained.

“Then don’t bother bloody asking.”

The intrusion felt like a thousand needles punching into his skull all at once and Hux thought he screamed, maybe, Ren pressing relentlessly through layer upon layer of his consciousness. One part of his brain was shouting to listen to the man and just let it happen but the rest of him simply couldn’t, the sensations too foreign and intense not to reject. Memories ripped unbidden from the recesses of his mind: the scent of caf, blood on his teeth, the sickening snap of his own fingers, stony faces of people whose names he didn’t know but hated passionately, questions asked a hundred different ways with a hundred different tortures. The empty relief of finally being allowed sleep after deprivation on deprivation. Loneliness. Ferality clawing beneath his skin. Blacking out, hoping he wouldn’t wake up. Organa’s controlled face, the numbing high.

Hux gasped, coming back to himself to find his right hand in a death grip on Ren’s wrist and the other outstretched defensively against his chest. The Knight let Hux push him angrily away, sitting back on the ground.

“He ordered you to kill me if I had told them anything, didn’t he,” Hux panted.

Ren nodded silently, just once. After a hesitant moment he reached up and flipped the clasps on his helmet, tossing it down into a puff of sunlit dust. His face looked raw with relief and anxiety. Hux found his eyes and held them viciously.

“Would you have done it?”

“Hux, I-“

“Would you have _done it,_ Ren?”

“I- I don’t know.” He scrubbed a hand over his eyes, hiding his conflicted expression.

“You don’t-”

“It doesn’t matter. I knew you’d be too bitterly stubborn to break.”

“It does! When a gear gives in, you dispose of it and find a replacement.” Hux’s voice kept rising, echoing off the canyon walls as he leaned forward. “I am just another gear! I’m expendable!”

“You’re not.” Ren’s voice came out small, perhaps the smallest he’d ever heard it.

“Excuse me?”

“The Order needs you. Snoke never understood how crucially you held the whole operation together. It’s been chaos. And I- You’re not expendable to me.”

“You hate me. I hate _you._ ”

Ren shot up and paced towards the shuttle.

“You're right, I do! You infuriate me!” He was shouting now, spinning back and gesturing wildly. “But every day you were gone was a night I couldn’t sleep. I- Kriff. I wanted to punch Yatsuho in the teeth every time I saw him giving orders on the bridge instead of you. It took Phasma _two days_ to get financial authorization from him for universal trooper re-evaluations!”

Hux stared, mouth hanging slightly open.

“I left the moment we broke encryption on the transmission that had that bunker’s coordinates. I missed you, you horrible, heartless man, alright? I missed you. And I’m not saying that just because we get furious at each other and fuck it out sometimes.” Ren fixed him with a final glare, flushed and heaving.

He kept staring.

Ren groaned, the sound almost turning into a shriek at the end, frustratedly knotting his fingers back in his hair and stalking away.

Hux’s brain slowly lurched back into gear, finally kicking past the _I couldn’t sleep,_ the _I missed you_. He hated Ren for his insubordination, his free-ranging temper and his esoteric Force-bound obligations and allowances, and yet each one of those reasons could double for why he also craved his presence. There _had_ been a tug there, something mutual buried beneath the fights that devolved into half-clothed dominance contests and the less energetic post-coital irritation. No one else in the Order could openly challenge the General and endure the repercussions. They would not survive, professionally or physically depending on his mood.

He pushed himself awkwardly up the side of the speeder until he could sit sideways on the seat, observing the Knight where he paced. His robes swung around him, browned at the edges by dirt and dust and drying blood, accentuating his powerful form and the danger it carried. The danger that had destroyed an entire Resistance outpost for Hux, personally. Because he’d missed him. Something organic and uncontrollable but not new—hells forbid, it felt like _attachment_ , he realized—flared in Hux’s heart. Their eyes caught.

“You’re a kriffing idiot.”

“What?”

“I said, you’re a kriffing idiot. Come here.”

Ren approached uncertainly, lingering at the edge of his space. Hux reached out and grabbed the front of his cowl, pulling him in the rest of the way. Their knees knocked, Ren’s searching eyes deep and dark, and then Hux tugged him down into a surprisingly gentle kiss. He nipped once at the Ren’s lip, the other man’s arms bracing his bulk over Hux and the speeder.

“I like the beard,” he panted when Hux let him break contact. “You should keep it.”

Hux snorted. “I think not.”

“It could look very imposing.”

“Stop,” he commanded, too tired to play their habitual game of jabs and snipes, especially about something as trivial as his facial hair. Ren chuckled dismissively and stepped back, a pleased half-smile now gracing his lips in place of all the anxiety and angry doubt his expressive face betrayed before. His mole-flecked skin glowed in the diffuse light, his dark hair cast with golden edges where they really had no right to be.

“You know, I would have left you on Starkiller. I’m beginning to appreciate that I didn’t.”

This time it was Ren’s turn to snort. “Only now? You never give me proper credit.”

“Oh, don’t start, Ren.”

“I hate you.”

“I hate you too. Now help me up.”

The Knight threaded an arm around Hux’s torso, letting him cling as they stood. Hux winced, the pressure on his side aggravating the tender bruises there, but more uncomfortably jostling a hard lump just under his ribs. They shuffled slowly to the shuttle, the red earth crumbling beneath his toes.

“You need surgery.”

“What I need is fresh clothes and a proper med bay. Surgery isn’t critical right now.”

“I had no idea you were diabetic.”

“Good. And nobody else needs to know. If I start shaking and pass out, inject me with glucagon. I’ll show you how to do it, but as long as you have food in that shuttle, it shouldn’t be a problem. I can monitor my blood sugar levels acceptably without the implant until we get out of here.”

Ren situated Hux on a bench inside and went to ransack the medical locker. Hux gingerly stripped off his stained shirt, revealing a patchwork of lacerations and bruises in various states of bloom that surprised even him, not having disrobed fully in days. The trousers were harder, the blaster wound having seeped through the weave and crusted them to his leg.

When Ren turned back and saw the damage, a flood of enraged pressure erupted through the hold. Hux smiled grimly, basking in its glow.

 

 

Later, lying in a blanket on the shuttle’s open ramp with fresh bacta on his wounds and splinted fingers, Hux gazed up through the warm night at a strip of unfamiliar stars. Soft breaths came from behind him, Ren’s sleeping form huffing rhythmically inside the hatch.

He pushed all his thoughts from his head: Snoke’s inevitable judgement, his fleet’s disjointed and uncertain state, the cancerous disloyalty in his ranks, his burning desire to crush the Resistance permanently beneath his boot heel. All of that would come later. For now he was trying, as Ren had put it once, to “turn off.” He slipped calmly into the rare sensations of breeze playing over his skin and faint nocturnal calls echoing above the rim of the canyon, and found he rather liked it.

Sometimes retribution fermented most sweetly while untended.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joke's on you, this whole thing was just an excuse to do bad things to Hux. Anyway. I hope you liked it.  
>  ~~I'm totally not a sap, not at all.~~
> 
> There will be an epilogue! It'll go up in a couple days as a separate work in the series because it's long and I want to keep this one rated M. So don't change that dial just yet, if you know what I mean.


End file.
